NYC documentary photographer Martha Cooper joins Berlin graffiti collective 1UP Crew for a night of artwork, movie screenings and DJ’s. Featuring an exhibition of all-new canvases and artworks, as well as signed books and shirts. There will also be brand new screen prints, hand pulled by Aisle6ix Industries in Sydney, and an ultra-limited 1UP flash tattoo studio. The team will also be giving Revolver a fresh lick of paint, with three new 1UP walls.

Selina Miles is celebrating her award-winning new documentary on Martha Cooper, ‘Martha: A Picture Story’, for a special matinee screening at The Astor Theatre at 3pm on the 6th December, which she will introduce herself. After releasing at Melbourne International Film Festival earlier in the year, the movie is out now across Australia. Get your tickets to the pre-event screening here:

Selina will step on stage with Martha at Revolver later in the evening for an exclusive live Q&A to answer your questions about life and a shared love for graffiti – get your questions in at the link below, then come down to Revs from 5pm to secure your spot at the session.

Throughout the night, there will also be two showcases from Australian DMC 2019 champion DJ Wallzee and triple-time ACT DMC champ Buick serving up technical trickery and treats for your ears. Following the DJ showcases will be an unreleased cut of 1UP Crew’s adventures in NYC!

Don’t sleep though, there will be limited tickets released for the two sessions at intervals throughout the evening. As well as the two DMC champs, other DJ’s include The Dark Horse’s DJ Klevaone and long-time Rev’s residents Who and Mu-Gen on the decks.

1UP’s guest of honour for the evening is one of Melbourne’s graffiti kings, NOST, who has been invited by the crew to represent for the city’s underground scene. A line-up of all-Australian artists will also be exhibiting, as Dr Dosey curates a line-up of local legends, featuring new pieces from: AEON – DOSE – DVATE – JME – LING – NASTE – PILFER – RANSOM – SHEM – SILK – ZODE

Melbourne’s street art fans have long been able to view Kaff’s paintings in the city laneways and abandoned spaces; paintings of large, looming characters with nude human bodies, deer skull heads, and hooves for feet. Kaff-eine’s intriguing ‘deerhunters’ are iconic and enjoyed equally by a diverse audience.

The exhibition opens on the 11th December and is her first show dedicated entirely to her deerhunters, with a refreshing change. Instead of using professional models, Kaff-eine invited her followers and the public to model nude and direct their own shoots for the portraits. “I wanted to see what would happen when people created their own deerhunters,” she recalled. Over 300 people from around Australia responded to her initial invitation; Southern Wild showcases the first collection of portraits, based on people from Melbourne and surrounds.

“Each model chose their own props to bring to the session, and posed as they liked. It meant that I never knew in advance what the portrait would look like, nor was I able to shape the tone of the exhibition, but I loved it,” Kaff-eine enthused. “Posing nude, knowing that their face was being replaced with a skull meant that people expressed themselves anonymously and openly, and shared the often-hidden histories written into their flesh. I’ve been blown away by what we’ve created together’.

The process has resulted in a collection of commanding nude deerhunter portraits in watercolour, charcoal and spray paint, which reflect a range of genders, sexualities, desires and body types. Lush and sensual, intimate and powerful, these deerhunters with real everyday bodies are anonymous but full of their masters’ eccentricities, egos and stories.

Kaff-eine invites audiences to surround themselves with her creatures and celebrate the beauty and diversity of the human form at her exhibition, located in the dark underbelly of an old wool warehouse in Kensington. “I’d been wanting to make a deerhunter exhibition for years now; then I found The Tallows, a shadowy mysterious space, and I knew this was where I had to have this show.”

Brian Viveros returns to LA’s Thinkspace Projects with his latest solo show ‘Tougher Than Leather’. It’s his first new complete collection of never-before-seen works in almost four years in the Los Angeles area. The exhibition will showcase over 15 new paintings, pastel works, detailed charcoal renderings and a new print edition. There will be a free exclusive collectors poster for the first 200 patrons who attend, a new limited edition ‘DirtyLAnd’ enamel pin and an installation sculpture entitled EviLAst!

‘Tougher Than Leather is dedicated to the fighter in all of us. All that are fighting for their lives, fighting their inner demons and fighting the evil that is cancer. The artist’s iconic warrior women are emblematic of their refusal to submit; tough but sensual, they embody the courage of the feminine as empowered Victor. These heroes cannot be broken. They bleed, they fight, they are Tougher Than Leather.’

One of the world’s leading female street artists, Vexta, is making a triumphant return to the art scene with her brand new exhibition, Cosmos, a visual exploration and emotional response to the current environmental crisis. The exhibition will launch on Friday 2 August at KSR Art Bar, 6-8pm and will be open to the public until Wednesday 21 August. This will be supported by a series of interactive events, including an immersive dinner, Japanese meditative tea ceremony, a transformative sound healing and an artist talk hosted by Co-Curator, Andrew King.

Cosmos will be filled with her iconic geometric symbology and eye-catching neon aesthetic: birds of wisdom and warning, figures flying and falling in amongst a tangle of natural elements, separated from the earth, yet still bound by it. Her latest works are a personal response to the present state of the environment and an emotive description of our connection to nature. As she explains: “This new body of work is really important to me because it takes my iconic flying imagery and raises it to the next level; making it more personal, more intricate, and ideologically drenched in the nuances of the times we live in.”

This exhibition takes its title from Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, a book written by Alexander Von Humboldt — known as the father of ecology — which predated Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. One of the first Western thinkers to provide a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity, Von Humboldt described the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change back in the 1800s.

Cosmos is an invitation to look inwards, to connect with our feelings — to examine how healing our connection to our sense of self can heal our world.

Vexta is a self-taught artist from Sydney Australia. With a background in Street Art beginning in the mid-2000s, her bold and extravagant artworks have invaded our visual landscape from Melbourne to Mexico and everywhere in between, from large-scale murals to gallery exhibitions, she is a nomad of our modern times. She has exhibited extensively across Australia, Europe and North America.

In 2009, Anthony Lister held a one-night-only pop-up art event in Sydney’s Kings Cross, entitled No Win Sitch. The show encompassed an installation in notorious Strip Club, Porky’s.

To mark the ten-year anniversary of No Win Sitch, Lister presents a brand new installation, CULTURE IS OVER, once again paying homage to the colourful old school Kings Cross culture.

The pop-up will be a week-long free exhibition for the public. Inspired by the Lister’s iconic artwork ‘Moloch of Luna Park’, 2017, attendees can expect a twisted trip into the paranormal mystery of Luna Park’s unidentified horned man, as well as the plethora of Kings Cross nightlife and characters, conveyed through his painting, sculpture and video installations.

Expect occult themes, introspective in-painting analysis of form and movement, Basquiat-style outpourings and Lister’s usual kickback against the cops.

When we fall asleep, where do we travel? Can we go there entirely conscious? The transitional state between sleep and wakefulness— Hypnagogia—is the ephemeral portal that opens every night allowing us to dive in dreams consciously. After exploring the concept of presence in daily life with her last show, Lucy Lucy is now taking this idea into the world of dreams. Being aware in dreams is possible and strange. The delicate skill of traveling through the dreamscape mindfully is incredibly powerful. In this new body of work Lucy aims to capture the elusive joy and power of the hypnagogic state by depicting her subjects in this state of limbo playing with mysterious forms plugged into their mind, linking conscious and unconscious. Those bedtime travellers are mindfully interacting with their dawning dreams. Playing with the weird and the wonderful by engaging lucidly with the subconscious may be just a question of intention.

Currently residing in Melbourne, Parisian born artist Lucy Lucy has graciously carved her niche in the Australian urban art community. Her work moves between large-scale public murals, gallery exhibitions, book illustration and tribal ornaments.

Marking Hill’s debut Melbourne solo exhibition, A Measure Of All Things explores how structures and language combine to become a scale in which our experiences exist, where the physical world connects and shapes our own interpretations.

Aspects of Hill’s large scale mural practice are distilled and reframed through canvas artworks, installation and paper studies, where the parallels of physical spaces and everyday conversation are layered, abstracted and manipulated into new landscapes and fragments of reflection. These works shift between simplifying and overwhelming concepts of experience, showing moments of clarity in boundaries and simplified forms, juxtaposed against instances of tension or reflection in textures, repetition, and phrasing. These works build to consider our varied experiences and memories, and what shapes the enduring significance of one place or point in time.

Georgia Hill is an Australian artist, specialising in contemporary, often site-specific based artworks that combine bold, monochromatic textures and lettering within experimental compositions.

Using a range of mediums, her instantly recognisable aesthetic can be read in terms of connections, relationships, time, place and community. Over the past four years, Hill’s works have developed from smaller exhibition works to large-scale installations that explore how structures and our natural environments are vital in allowing experiences to exist and develop from one physical context to another. Constantly on the road, Hill’s current gallery practice reflects her personal experience of moving fast then slow, continuously juxtaposing landscapes, and bold impressions of the physical and mental spaces our experiences come to exist in.

Hill’s works have spanned galleries, inner-city walls and even 400ft abandoned buildings in countries including India, New Zealand, Iceland, The United States, Canada, Japan, Indonesia, and across Australia.

Following successful art exhibitions in London, Sydney and Los Angeles, Mysterious Al is back in Melbourne for his solo show: ‘Blinking into the Sunlight’, opening Friday 24th May 6pm – 9pm.

Rising to fame in the early 2000s in the UK, with the emergence of street-art alongside D*Face and Word to Mother, Mysterious Al has worked with Vans, Yahoo!, Carhartt, Volvo and Levi’s, even creating custom designed shoes with Adidas.

After the controversial backlash to his ‘Amy Winehouse – Bride of Frankenstein’, a chance encounter with some African masks at a London museum gave the artist new-found inspiration;

“I was desperate for a piss so popped into the museum to find a toilet. I went the wrong way and ended up in a room full of African masks. These crazy dudes were simple and crudely made yet they had so much character and expression. It was a time in my life when I was feeling lost and trapped within my work, and the vibe of these masks gave me a newfound energy. I made my first mask painting that night.” – Says Al.

Mysterious Al is returning to his roots to create an unforgettable, one weekend-only exhibition showing brand new canvases and installations.

His new solo exhibition will showcase over 30 new works through an experiential journey from darkness to light.

‘Blinking into the Sunlight’ is open to the public Friday 24th to Sunday 26th May at 16-20 Langridge St, Collingwood, VIC.

Backwoods Gallery is an independently run commercial gallery that began as an Artist Run Initiative in 2010. From humble beginnings as a platform for its artist owners to exhibit artwork of their own, Backwoods has grown to become world recognised, working with the likes of MONA and The Japan Foundation.

As a small commercial gallery, they do not receive funding from government arts grants, nor do they have the support from another commercial business. In most cases galleries rely on one or the other for funding due to the volatile nature of the industry.

Backwoods’ unique situation means the gallery relies on sales from exhibitions to rent the space, run projects, workshops, produce exhibitions, pay wages and more. The reality of hands-on collaboration with their artists and community has helped them forge strong and long-lasting relationships all the artists with whom they work, all of which they consider to be good friends, as well as their community of friends and collectors.

Backwoods Gallery only exhibits artists they really believe in, have relationships with, and who are a part of their community, such as Minna Leunig, Shohei Otomo, Reka, Twoone, Roa, Fintan Magee, Georgia Hill and more. They are dedicated to working, developing and growing with the artists they represent to ensure long-lasting, professional relationships.

Due to rising overheads, the gallery requires significant financial assistance to run smoothly. To meet these ongoing challenges they have planned an annual fundraiser which aims to take the pressure off day-to-day operations to allow them to continue to produce great exhibitions.

The online fundraiser auction will feature significant artworks from artists they’ve worked with closely over the past 9 years. The artworks will be hung in a special weekend exhibition at the gallery, with all funds raised going to help pay overheads for the space.

The exhibition will run from the 24th to the 26th May, and will be a silently auctioned online, open to all collectors and guests both locally and internationally.

Following the international debut of their new short film, High Power, at Hong Hong’s Mahka Gallery as part of Business of Design Week, Guerrilla Theatre Brand (GTB) are brought their critically acclaimed movie back to Melbourne for its Australian premiere.

GTB is the brainchild of Paul Stam, who did away with the traditional constraints of the catwalks with his innovative 360-degree approach to art and fashion. Creating a mythical, multi-layered narrative, chronicling visions of the future, Stam collaborates with local artists to interpret the various verses in each chapter into clothing, before bringing his character’s journey to life through film, art and fashion.

Chapter 2, High Power, finds the story’s protagonist Guerri – a hybrid human with powers that allow him to travel into other realities – who, with his spirit guide, Soph, is battling a malevolent entity intent on consuming humanity using our own technology against us.

Paul Stam explains: “It was important to match each artist’s style to what is happening in their verse – we wanted each artist to bring their own unique point of view and aesthetic, and to truly showcase their talents as they brought the story to life.”

Each range is shaped by the story, taking luxury streetwear to a new level as wearable art, which is all designed and manufactured in Melbourne. Some of the key pieces of the collection include a limited-edition hand-beaded velvet kimono and a made-to order leather biker jacket covered with 1,000 hand-cut crystal stone spikes. These highlights complement streetwear staples, including printed tees, hoodies and reversible bomber jackets.

To celebrate the premiere of their short film, GTB teamed up with 42below, Patron, COMMUNE Group, AFC Curated, SoHigh Gallery and Alice-D Magazine to throw a party where Chapter 2, HIGHER POWER was showcased. Set to the beats of SUNSHINE and PHILLIPS HEAD.